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Thursday, 22 December 2016

DENIAL. The connection between a Holocaust denier and BDS.

I was reading a review of a new
movie called ‘Denial’ in the Jerusalem Post.

The movie depicts the libel suit
brought by Deborah Lipstadt, portrayed in the movie by Rachel Weisz, against
the infamous Holocaust denier, David Irving.

There is a scene in the movie
where Irving taunts a young and inexperienced Lipstadt as she was trying to
deliver a college lecture about the Holocaust and I was struck by the
similarities between that incident and the anti-Israel bullies who intimidate
anyone presenting an Israeli perspective.

Lipstadt explains that she felt
like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck, without a strategy,
uncertain how to respond.

How familiar this emotion sounds
to anyone confronted by BDS antagonists.

Explaining the feeling she had in
compiling her case against Irving she described Irving as employing what TV
comedian, Stephen Colbert, later called “truthiness.” That is compiling
a list of half facts and distortions and yelling about it to make it stick you
give it credibility and prove your point to a wide audience. But, deeply and
profoundly Irving was a fraud and an anti-Semite.

Pro-Israel advocates are very
familiar with the “truthiness” of the BDS bullies.

She was increasingly disturbed by
students asking her if Anne Frank’s diaries were genuine or questioning whether
gas chambers really existed. She began to realise that Holocaust denial was
making inroads into students’ minds. She
understood that something profoundly wrong was happening. So Lipstadt began to research Holocaust
denial making Irving her test case.

By comparison, we can see the
relevance to the inroads that have been made by Israel deniers. They get into
people’s heads with insinuations that sound reasonable even emotionally
seductive in their imagery and too many people are caught in the headlights of
onrushing criticism and condemnation of the Jewish state, floundering to find
the right answers.

Deborah Lipstadt did the
research. Methodically she went through every statement made by Irving and
began to find discrepancies. As a historian bringing a case against this noted
Holocaust denier she was aware that the accuracy of her work was essential to
expose the fraud. She had to prove that he distorted the truth. She studied how
he constantly changed facts, lied and obscured events and avoided unpleasant
truths that would have exposed his ultimate intention to besmirch the murder of
six million Jews.

People like David Irving are
people driven by prejudice and hate. So
it is with people obsessed in bringing down Israel. Like David Irving they can
be humiliated by studying their distorted arguments and exposing them.

I have made it my obligation to
prove that the majority of BDS activists who profess to be passionately
pro-Palestinian are, quite bluntly, using the Palestinian cause as the
instrument to attack the Jewish state and that they do not really care a hoot
for Palestinian human rights and are firmly against any justice or Israeli
human rights, not even the right to exist.
I have researched their arguments and discovered they are as flawed as
David Irving’s denials. Here are just a
few examples;

They spend a week on global
campuses promoting the notion of an Israeli apartheid, yet have nothing to say
about the apartheid practices of many Arab regimes against fellow Arabs who
claim to be Palestinian including keeping them stateless and deprived of many
of the rights of normal citizens in their countries.

Worse still, these
activists have nothing to say about the apartheid policy of a Palestinian Authority
that has a United Nations organisation house and feed thousands of Palestinians
in refugee camps under their territorial and administrative control for fifty
years. How obscene is that? One would expect BDS to demonstrate against this if
they really cared about the abuse of Palestinian human rights. But they are
totally silent.

The same applies with the slander
that Israel is “ethnically cleansing” Palestinians when statistics show
that numbers have dramatically increased under Israeli supervision. On the
other hand, pro-Palestinian human rights groups have failed to protest the
Assad-led ethnic cleansing of Palestinians living in Syrian camps.

Just as Irving lied so do
anti-Israel activists in solidarity for Palestinian rights. They accuse Israel
of imposing a total and “illegal” blockade on Gaza when, in fact, up to
a thousand trucks a day roll into the Strip carrying materials and equipment
that Israelis know will fall into the hands of Hamas and be used to reconstruct
their anti-Israel terrorist infrastructure at the expense of the Palestinians these
protesters profess to support. No
protest against the oppressive and cruel Hamas regime. No demand to ‘Boycott
Egypt’ while this Arab country maintains an almost total blockage on Gaza.

Just as David Irving was exposed
for conducting a fraudulent campaign of denial against the Jewish people so
BDS, SJP and other haters are conducting a fraudulent campaign of denial
against the Jewish State.

At the heart of both lies an
anti-Semitism that cannot be denied.

Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy
at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.

He is the author of ‘Fighting Hamas, BDS and
Anti-Semitism’ and the Amazon 2016 best-seller ‘BDS for IDIOTS.’